The reddit thread is really good - a few interesting things are the Notch post (I think he's the mindcraft guy) is very bigger picture, and I kind of understood the poster who says its ruined now because he/she thought it should be to escape and get away from people and mixing it up with social media is just going to do the opposite. We have one at work and you really do feel like you're in a secret world where you can get up to all sorts, it's great.

Something that I found a bit scary is the idea that it can be used for mental health therapy like phobias and stuff, I can understand why people are creeped out by facebook getting their hands on it.

But wasn't the kickstarter just for the v initial version? People need to understand that kickstarting something doesn't give them control or influence in the same way that actual investors have. Anyone dropping like $10k on the kickstarter should have been smart enough to comprehend this.

but probably had faith that the guys making it were unlikely to sell to the first company who waved a cheque at them as soon as they got it sort of up and running. Whilst there's nothing at all illegal or underhanded about this it is at least ethically very shady.

I think anyone expecting "ethics" beyond the illegal or underhanded from a tech startup - esp someone who doesn't expect a tech startup to sell out hard and fast - has, shall we say, a beautifully benign view of humanity?

But, yeah, I still don't get why Facebook, in particular, wanted this. I think it has so much potential, but unless Facebook are willing to open it up to other developers, which I get the impression they're not really going to do, I can see it being stifled.

There is a lot of hate for Facebook in the nerdy population and these are the people that lead in tech. I also worry that FB will get bored of this after a while and drop it where as if it was a slow burning product I will grow at the speed it needs to.

1. FB isn’t using real money to buy this, it is $400m and stock. And the $400m came from stock sales
2.FB wants to be in everything you use. Everything. This is a fantastic bit of kit which will be popular, and FB will be integrated into it.
3.I was rather *curious* about the Whatsapp acquisition until I saw the numbers, now it makes sense. This makes sense immediately.
4 FB has demographics of high growth (Wza’s ‘Mum’s and Wankers’ springs to mind), but in other demographics it is flatlining, and even worse use is dropping off. These acquisitions create growth literally from thin air, basically for free, in demographics that they can’t currently touch. You think the nerds that are OculusVR early adopter use Facebook a lot
5.Palmer Luckey becomes a multimillionaire on paper (and who besides Brusma wouldn’t want that?) and the publicity that the acquisition creates means that success is pretty much garunteed, at least at first. And the only person he has really pissed off is the guy who created Minecraft.

You'll have the offers pre-activated on your phone, which will then be used for contactless payment (assuming QR codes don't take off here). There's no way that 1)logging in to a public portal like that will be popular, or that 2) people will want to add another step to the process of using a checkout.

just that there wuill be a nice way of Tesco and Facebook sharing all the data they have on you, with your concent. The nerds can worry about QR codes or contactless payment or chips inserted into your brain.

Not just him. The thing that drove OR's initial success was the promise of an open platform for developers. Even a cursory glance at articles covering this shows that those developers are now awaiting more information from Sony on their kit. Until this Facebook announcement, that would have been unthinkable.

This Oculus shit is a new technology, and not one that might have trouble getting people interested. People have been waiting for this sort of thing for decades, and this looks like it might actually work. And Facebook is providing the userbase.

The publicity certainly will raise awareness (how many laypeople had heard of Oculus Rift before this morning), but I think that Faebook's motivation is that OR provides an 'in' for Facebook to access a younger userbase, plus the tech and security-savvy people who are deserting it in droves.

the Raspberry PI/Arduino of VR, as in cool relatively open tech for makers and developers. This could actually be a great opportunity for facebook to actually engage with that community but chances are that's not going to happen so I can see why people would be disappointed.

Notch was hugely invested in the Oculus Rift during its infancy and actually pledged 10K via Kickstarter for its development/manufacture.

He was also in talks with them to bring Minecraft to the Oculus Rift platform however following its acquisition by facebook he has cancelled those plans and stated he has no plans to be linked to a facebook affiliated company.

It's neat, but it's not far away enough from strapping a box to your head as it needs to be to shake the VR stigma.

I think PC gamers are too cynical to make it work as well, especially since there's been alternatives announced now. They'll be whining en masse about resolutions/framerate/bugs within minutes of its release.